Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Friday, November 18, 2011

Revising WWII History (Take the Shine Off FDR)

Just 60 years ago, in November 1951, Herbert Hoover told an acquaintance, John W. Hill: "When Roosevelt put America in to help Russia as Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, we should have let those two bastards annihilate themselves."

Umnnnhhh.....yah.

Or this on Churchill:

He had a "surpassing power of oratory and word pictures," Hoover wrote, but "intellectual integrity was not his strong point." The Gathering Storm was "a mass of bitter attacks upon [Stanley] Baldwin and [Neville] Chamberlain who had kept him out of office for years."

---which is not news to anyone who actually studied Churchill's un-varnished history.

And, of course, the Error in China:

Hoover was also highly critical of George Marshall, who became Harry Truman's Secretary of State. Hoover got on well with Truman (in contrast to Roosevelt). Still, Truman had sacrificed "all China" to the Communists, "by insistence of his left-wing advisors and his appointment of General Marshall to execute their will."

Joe McCarthy was right. Ask any of the billion-or-so enslaved in PRChina today.

5 comments:

"Truman had sacrificed 'all China'...Gene McCarthy was right. Ask any of the billion-or-so enslaved in PRChina today."

First, Eugene McCarthy was a madman who ruined the lives of thousands of Americans.

Second, it seems you are suggesting it would have been in the best interest of the United States to have "saved' China from communism, even if the American people were not on board, considering their fear that nuclear showdown with the U.S.S.R. may have resulted. So, if that is what you are inferring, Bill Kristol would be proud of you!

Third, Chiang Kai-Shek and his dictatorial policies, NOT Truman, was the primary factor for China to go red.

Anyhoo, the author of the American Spectator piece correctly points out that "we inevitably run into the problem of counterfactual history, because we do not know what would have happened if different choices had been made."

So one cannot use Hoover's conjectures as "proof" that the "shine should be taken off of FDR", because Hoover has the benefit of hindsight...AND two conservative intellectual heavyweights who are publishing the book to repair his reputation at the expense of his political nemesis.

"...we should have let [Russia and Germany] annihilate themselves."

Um, yah, as in your agree, or as in this statement is poppycock? The main problem with the "Let Hitler and Stalin duke it out" is that we do not know the end result. Let me speculate, for the sake of argument...imagine Germany and the U.S.S.R. engaged in a battle of attrition while Germany's industrial infrastructure works toward developing nuclear weapons along with the requisite delivery systems.

So there are many "what ifs", and in this instance no assurance that Hoover's policy of non-interventionism would have been any wiser than FDR.